Sci-Fi Nation Roleplay - What would it take to hold your interest

[MissingAxis]

This is sort of a two-birds-one-stone deal. This is an interest check, but it will also serve as a general discussion early on.

I'm looking to start up a sci-fi nation roleplay, as I have an itch that has needed to be scratched for at least a year now. Nation roleplays have a tendency to be stillborn, self-destruct, or otherwise wither away. Sci-fi nation roleplays are no different. Obviously there's interest for it, as they continue to be made time and time again. However, most never seem to get out of the OOC.

I want to know what you as a player want in a sci-fi nation roleplay. I want to know what it takes to hold your interest and keep you posting. I hope that by holding a discussion here, I can attract a decent number of potential players and hash things out. In the end, the group may not be large, but it will hopefully be fairly dedicated and involved in the roleplay.

One of the biggest issues I see in these sorts of roleplays is that a large number of players put in their character sheets or enter into discussion, but ultimately end up leaving because the other players aren't producing the kind of nations they were expecting, or the game environment as a whole changes. The OOC tab gets a higher and higher number as people discuss their expectations, argue about the best way to do things, and ultimately the IC suffers for it.

I want to have that discussion here, before we begin. Tell me your thoughts on the matter, tell me what you want, and tell me how to keep you around as a player. If we can gather enough like-minded roleplayers and work out compromises now, independent of the setting backdrop and the nations populating the world, I believe we can create and sustain a roleplay that we'll all enjoy.

If you're interested in a general sci-fi nation roleplay, post your thoughts and discuss.

Kind regards.

[Charles]

First off, I completely agree with you. Second off I made an interest check for this other thread to try to revive it.

Interest Check: http://www.roleplayerguild.com/topics/157433-a-new-mockz-miniature-people-wwii-rp-red-before-you-get-butthurt/ooc
Actual Post:
http://www.roleplayerguild.com/topics/154706-mockz-backyard-warfare-wwii-on-a-miniature-scale/ooc

The actual post is pretty long but it's exactly what I want but I want something a tad simplified.

[MissingAxis]

First off, I completely agree with you. Second off I made an interest check for this other thread to try to revive it.

@Charles

This thread is an interest check for a sci-fi nation roleplay.

[Charles]

That IS Sci-Fi. I was saying what I would be interesting. BTW the tag is Sci-Fi AND the post is Sci-Fi, normally you don't control real humans who are 1-2 inches tall, can think, know who you are as the creator, and can be modelled to look, think, and sound like anything you want. I would consider that Sci-Fi. You asked to know what we would like an that is it. I would like to revive that. The owner has recently been inactive.

[Dragonruby]

Right, well... Blatant thread de-railing aside... I'd be interested in a sci-fi game like this. It's been a while since I've done something nation-RP based, let alone sci-fi, so it'd be more something for me to stretch my creative muscles, so to speak. Probably won't be coming up with the most original thing out there, but I'm pretty open to most things and don't have much holding me back in terms of expectations.

[Polybius]

I think its pretty well known that excessive nation-sheet building before the RP begins is a bad way to start. Forget all the excessive history, detailed alien race bios etc. Tell us what the heck your nation is all about. What are the goals and aspirations of your nations leaders? What are they willing to do? Excessive lore-building and detailed alien histories are fine and dandy, but they bog down the meat of the RP. While I certainly enjoy the narrative-driven RP style that seems to dominate the NRP forums, at times I also want to feed my megalomania and control a nation, not tell three different stories over the course of a few months to figure out if my nation put troops on the border or not. I think what I'm getting at is I want my nation to have influence in the game world, and to interact meaningfully with NPC's, PC's and leave an impact. Hope this helps-

[MissingAxis]

I think its pretty well known that excessive nation-sheet building before the RP begins is a bad way to start. Forget all the excessive history, detailed alien race bios etc. Tell us what the heck your nation is all about. What are the goals and aspirations of your nations leaders? What are they willing to do? Excessive lore-building and detailed alien histories are fine and dandy, but they bog down the meat of the RP. While I certainly enjoy the narrative-driven RP style that seems to dominate the NRP forums, at times I also want to feed my megalomania and control a nation, not tell three different stories over the course of a few months to figure out if my nation put troops on the border or not. I think what I'm getting at is I want my nation to have influence in the game world, and to interact meaningfully with NPC's, PC's and leave an impact. Hope this helps-

@Polybius

These are very good points to bring up, and I agree. Often, I join NRPs with the barest of nation descriptions, with the intent to show the other players what the history and culture are through interactions and short-but-sweet exposition. By keeping the history and culture in the nation sheet to the bare necessities, I have flexibility if I need to change details to better mesh with the other players. I also believe it helps maintain interest in other player-nations if you reveal the information slowly throughout interactions, rather than telling everyone through an info-dump at the start of the thread.

Interacting with other players is definitely more important than building a civilization in a vacuum and then plopping it into a roleplay.

[ClocktowerEchos]

Rambling of someone mildly qualified to do so:

Not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but you need to have a way of limiting military and technology. Anyone whose has NRPed before will tell you, especially in a sci-fi/futuristic setting, there's always a penis measuring contest in technology and military. Also in another way, cultures/governments.

"My generators actually work on this highly theoretical and obscure idea that allows it to be 500% more efficient than your's!"

"Well my ships have superhypernanocomposite carbon-titanium-ferric crystalline armor plating allowing them to be more resistant to your sublight photon wave motion solar beam cannons!"

"Umm... my small arms aren't ballistic; they're actually tiny micro-munition clusters firing out of a coilgun that also explode on impact and spread radiation in the area around them but my guys are immune to that sort of radiation because their homeworld is full of it and its only harmful to other species."

"Well my 69-system planetary empire is fully efficient with no corruption and everyone only works for the good of the state and no one ever thinks of rebelling but it still has like the best security and scanner drones making sure that everyone is kept watch on and also making spying extremely difficult."

"Yeah, my guys have this massive military presence that can basically go up against anyone and want to expand their influence, but they're all really nice people and will only use their massive weapons and armies when they really have too."

"I have a military numbering in the billions but some how they're all volunteers who are completely loyal (but not brainwashed) and fearless with the best trained and all equipped with the finest weapons with little taxation from the citizens and still plenty of industry for consumer goods."

Shit I've seen before more or less

tl;dr - Basically prevent players from making "Mary Sue"/OP/broken factions or species with absolutely no sense of realism. I get it that its supposed to be fictional, but there are still some hard social things that are literally impossible to do with any system humans have thus far come up with. Trust me, nothing is more annoying than to see and NRP full of hyper militarist-imperialist that just have constant dick measuring contests but no one wants to be the aggressor and actually start shit in fear of "looking evil".

@MissingAxis

EDIT: Some extra bits:

- I suggest don't do the whole "intergalatic empire collasped and you plays as its bits and pieces" as there's already an NRP for it atm.
- Do not encourage massive novella-sized posts; that's a pretty good way of having people loose interest as they can't write those massive posts.
- Similar to the above but probably said before, don't have people go into incredible detail on a sheet, have them keep it in a hider or something for people who want to read up on it. This goes for everything from politics to culture, economics to military since no one is going to care what caliber your gun uses or what the hell a "Intra-system Collective Economic, Trade and Commercial Currency Committee" is, their 500 year history and how it relates to about a dozen other organizations at the local, planetary level. (This is coming from someone who put in 20+ hours of researching military shit for an NS at one point).

[ScreenAcne]

@ClocktowerEchos

Running with this. It would probably be a good idea to have a point system, a basic one.

I suggest that instead of limiting the empire you limit the origins. AKA: each point dictates what kind of starting planet they have.

A glorified rock. A mineral planet. A terra like resource rich one.

Is their starting galaxy easy to move about in. You know, does it have asteroid, weird stars. A black hole near. Points for that.

That way there can be...I dunno..blob brains in spaces suits with cool super suit tech. But the enviromental/outer limits logically cripple them.

[MissingAxis]

@ClocktowerEchos

I agree. It can be a tricky problem to combat, however. Often, it is left up to GM discretion, which is an issue if the GM is fairly apathetic or doesn't immediately see the potential for things to spiral out of control. For example, if a GM accepts a faction and the shenanigans ensue later on in the roleplay, any action the GM takes is then railed against with phrases such as "but you accepted my faction and it's listed in their tech section!"

I believe with a good group of roleplayers, those powergames shouldn't ever get off the ground, let alone be considered. Ideally, planning for a course of action against powergaming should be unnecessary. However, since it will always be a possibility among roleplayers in a public forum, I'm curious to hear if you've encountered any effective solutions. It seems making "No powergaming" a rule in the original post does little to deter people from attempting it.

[Palamon]

Interested for sure, and I suppose a quick 3 things I've learned from NRPs in the past:

- Prevent early fatigue and morale drop by preventing over-saturated character sheets and oocs. Get the info needed, get the meat of the what the nation is about and how its society/culture is structured, and then get to RPing.

- Prevent people using deus-ex-machina devices in order to prevent character death or perceived situations of "loss". This mean either using a point system for military, tech, and economic factors or by just being a more hands on GM.

- Last but certainly not least, begin the role-play based on precedent that it is first and foremost a STORY and that people die and lose in STORIES. Not everyone needs to win all the time and not everyone needs to lose all the time. This can prevent a lot of needless heartbreak and will attract only those roleplayers who are truly interested in telling a brilliant story.

That's really it. And yeah, definitely interested.

[ClocktowerEchos]

@MissingAxis Sorry to say it, but having a "no powergaming" rule doesn't tend to do shit and it seems that most people in my experience are "playing to win" over writing a story. People will still do it just because they want every edge they can get to show of their e-penis 9 times out of 10. If you can't tell, I don't have the greatest amount of faith in people at times.

As for what I suggest to do with, I know I am going to get shit by a good deal of people for saying this but, choose order over freedom. If someone is actively trying to get every edge they can, stamp them out and make them change. If someone is trying to use "creative freedom" as an excuse for anything that isn't remotely acceptable, make them change it. Your priorities as a GM is far different than that of a player for you also have to run the RP to begin with; if you fear having to be strict and use and iron fist on occasion over a bundle of roses all the time, I suggest that you harden your resolve or try something else.

A random bit: Maybe have the RP start in some kind of conflict with players already fighting a war they can't stay out of. It's give the RP some basic initial plot direction and let people vent their warmongering out. That said, you'd need faith in people to be able to accept that they aren't going to win every battle and be okay with "loosing" unless you want to either intervene yourself or use random numbers/dice rolls.

[Darkraven]

Probably won't be joining, but just gotta get this off my chest. One thing I noticed is that a sci-fi space NRP like this tend to start with everything very advanced. No opportunity for all that juicy scientific discoveries, historical events like first contact, nitty-gritty politics and stuff like that. One NRP is completely jam-packed with giant space nations with clashing borders and millions of ships, and almost utopian/dystopian societies. What's the point if we're already there!?

Then there's the fact that both extremely primitive societies and pretty much near-ascended-to-an-ethereal-planes ones are allowed to co-exist. It's pointless. People would probably just go for the top.

A sci-fi space NRP that starts from an earlier age of more innocent times would be awesome. At least give me something resembling Star Trek: Enterprise or something, jeez!

[ClocktowerEchos]

Probably won't be joining, but just gotta get this off my chest. One thing I noticed is that a sci-fi space NRP like this tend to start with everything very advanced. No opportunity for all that juicy scientific discoveries, historical events like first contact, nitty-gritty politics and stuff like that. One NRP is completely jam-packed with giant space nations with clashing borders and millions of ships, and almost utopian/dystopian societies. What's the point if we're already there!?

@Darkraven

I second this idea, haven't seen an NRP which actually deals with this. The idea of faulty sci-fi technologies and how people are still refining and discovering them is quite interesting although may take some additional talking and planning.

Not going to lie, this reminds me of the FTL system I used in an NRP nicknamed the "FTDerp Drive" since it had a habit either being off course by a few millimeters to a few light years because lolz

[ScreenAcne]

Moving into the idea of a NRP before the climax of societies powers.

There are a lot of options. A sci-fi nrp dosen't have to have ships. Maybe ships are an additional extension of the army and not the bulk. Like, fleets of space navies exist but unless you want to bombard a planet into crisp. Figuratively, doing so in a pre-ftl stage of tech for empires would be like nuking Earth.
----------------

Could be interesting to have a war in a smaller, more contain nugget of galaxy. Maybe even say...a stand off between races/planets for a single galaxy that have sent ships before hand decades ago. So the powers that be could be strong, even advanced. But the numbers there are limited.

once the faction already there is gone. That's it. No other of the empires ships are coming for like 50 years. Even then, any ships that arrive would be crazy out of date to attack said galaxy. That way..we can have a galactic war thats tone down, while having the big, crazy societies and races. Defeat is not some dramatic fall of an empire, just the start of a new space colonial age and an indication of who is going to have a good start.

Possibility for a continuation of story later on too despite who wins.

[Darkraven]

Galaxies attacking galaxies

@ScreenAcne

That's what I'm talking about man. Do you have any idea what it takes to colonise galaxies of that of that scale, even small ones? To cross the gulf between galaxies? If we're allowed to do that at the start of the NRP, then I say it's no fun. Even with the restrictions you proposed.

No offense, but my point stands.

[ScreenAcne]

<Snipped quote by ScreenAcne>

That's what I'm talking about man. Do you have any idea what it takes to colonise galaxies of that of that scale, even small ones? To cross the gulf between galaxies? If we're allowed to do that at the start of the NRP, then I say it's no fun. Even with the restrictions you proposed.

No offense, but my point stands.

@Darkraven

I know, I was supporting it. Let me rephrase. When I say galaxies attacking galaxies. I mean along the lines of. A single galaxy is prime seeding and in a realistic-aka dosen't take thousands of years of traveling- to seed.

Each faction arrive there in a race to seed it first. Starting the first attempt to colonize the stars. AKA, old colonial wars but in space. Sorry, I'm a bit tired so it might of sounded like I was talknig about galaxies of forces launching large campaigns against each other casually.

race-meaning taking shit loads of time on generational ships-

[MissingAxis]

It sounds like the general consensus is starting the player-nations off humbly and building them up, with the GM actively arbitrating situations the players can't settle, or otherwise implementing some sort of point-system.

I'm totally in favor of a humble start, but neutral on the matter of arbitration. I'm perfectly willing to make rulings as needed if players can't settle things themselves, but if anyone has previously experienced a nation roleplay with a decent point-system for arbitration, I'd like to hear a bit more about that. Ultimately, it'll come down to whether you guys want a system or structure to come to agreement with each other, or if you want the GM to make a decision when things can't be settled.

[ClocktowerEchos]

As a spin off to @ScreenAcne's idea, why not have it be like a cluster of virgin, gaia planets/systems, prime space real state, that we're all fighting over? Some of us could be in it just to colonize and expand, some just see the war as excellent practice for a highly martial culture, and for some, its literally their last hope for survival as they have no where else to go and their homeworld is destroyed or something.

In this way, we can have the mix of races/empires without having to be overly advanced but still have the colonization and all of the politics and warring involved!

[Darkraven]

<Snipped quote by Darkraven>

I know, I was supporting it. Let me rephrase. When I say galaxies attacking galaxies. I mean along the lines of. A single galaxy is prime seeding and in a realistic-aka dosen't take thousands of years of traveling- to seed.

Each faction arrive there in a race to seed it first. Starting the first attempt to colonize the stars. AKA, old colonial wars but in space. Sorry, I'm a bit tired so it might of sounded like I was talknig about galaxies of forces launching large campaigns against each other casually.

race-meaning taking shit loads of time on generational ships-

@ScreenAcne

Still doesn't work in my opinion. If you can cross the gulf of empty space between galaxies to colonise another, you're probably so advanced you'd shortly ascend to a higher plane of existence...

There's the implications too. You only colonise another continent when there's no land left to claim. So the parent nation that sent the colony ships are so advanced as to blanket an entire galaxy, or at most share one with a few nations. That comes back to how BIG galaxies are - if you can colonise an entire galaxy with !!!billions!!! of stars, then what sort of techs are you going to bring into the fray? Furthermore, how many colony ships would be sent? By right, thousands at least, millions realistically.

I feel that there's nothing wrong with starting out in your native galaxy.